Another in a series of Vandermark 5 progressions, The Color Of Memory (Atavistic) is far from some kind of Proustian conceit or a collection of reflections on jazz’s past. Instead, it represents Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark’s way of getting at new ideas, as with the movement from boppish noir at the start of “Burn Nostalgia” (a song dedicated to, of all people, the much more traditionalist ’50s alto-sax player Art Pepper) to a rhythmic breakdown on the out passage. Few current jazz musicians weave such disparate sources as Vandermark; nearly a decade after its formation, the Vandermark 5 can’t even claim to have a signature sound. For Vandermark, jazz is a liquid construction, music that moves in ripples and waves rather than serving as portraiture—moments in time, caught in time. Fresh off the release of the 12-disc Alchemia box set—a document of a five-day engagement in Krakow, Poland, last year—Vandermark engaged MAGNET on the state of modern jazz.

With the Vandermark 5, what’s the breakdown, in terms of performance, between the charts that you actually write out and the improvisational aspects of what the band is doing?
The actual notated material is about 20 percent of the music that’s played, in terms of duration. It depends on the piece. And the rest of it is usually organized in terms of who will play where and what kind of material they’ll be dealing with. But other than those particulars, the players themselves are quite free—I would hope—to interpret the material and do different things. I’m really influenced by the way Charles Mingus would write for his bands, motivate the players to rethink and reinvent the way they would approach a composition. I don’t know how familiar you are with the group he had with Eric Dolphy and Johnny Coles ...

Quite.
That’s one of my favorite groups. The period of time that they worked together, they basically worked off the same 10 charts or eight charts or whatever it was. I’ve heard lots of recordings from that period, and the way they would reinvent the material and change everything from backing lines of the horns for the prominent soloists to the sequence of events ... all of those kinds of ideas that Mingus had to keep things fresh, even with material that they must have known really, really well, has really inspired me to try and do the same thing with the quintet.

That has to be one of the most bootlegged jazz bands.
Yeah, it really is. Great stuff, though, because it really is different from performance to performance, a classic group.

As for Dolphy, when you play bass clarinet, I would imagine there has to be some influence from him coming through.
The reason I play the instrument is because of Dolphy. He’s a huge influence in terms of the horn itself, and I also really liked the way he used these large intervals in his playing, primarily in his soloing. It’s really interesting because there’s a lot there in those leaps that indicate the possibilities to create multiple layers of rhythm even if you’re using a monophonic instrument. It surprises me that not that many people seem to have taken up that part of his playing. There’s a lot there to be used. You don’t need to use the same jumps he had, but the idea of leaping from place to place frees the lines up quite a bit.

Mingus pretty much defined himself more as a composer than a player or band leader. Do you think of yourself as a writer who performs, or are they simply intertwined?
I would say they’re extremely intertwined for me. The reason I do the writing is to have chances to play. I realized really early on that by organizing my own groups and organizing my own material for those groups to play, there would be a way to get to some music. So I am involved in a lot of things, but those various projects are just ways to kind of deal with my curiosity. So the writing and playing and performing are pretty much inseparable, they’re intertwined and each allows the others to happen. I do a fair amount of totally open improvisation, playing particularly with musicians from Europe. The open improvising suggests different kinds of things to do.

Chicago has been your base for a long time. And now, as the director of the Chicago Improvisers Series, what made you gravitate toward the city?
I came here because, when I left Boston at the end of the ‘80s, there really weren’t a lot of places to play the kind of music I’m interested in. When I came back to Boston after studying film in college in Montreal, I played for a few years in the city, and it felt like I needed to go someplace else. Chicago has such a history of music, so many kinds of music, I figured if I wasn’t able to find people to work with, there’s a lot to see and deal with. When I first got here, the scene was quite fractured. There were a lot of people playing but there weren’t a lot of places to play. And the people who were outside mainstream jazz didn’t really work together too much. It took a couple of years before I found musicians who were interested in working in the same kinds of things as me. From the end of ’89 until the beginning of ’92, I was just writing music in a room, trying to find people to work with—and once I did, things sort of turned a corner. And since about the middle of the ’90s, the scene here has become a lot more unified. There’s a lot more cross-pollination with different kinds of rock musicians. That musical curiosity is something that is historic in Chicago. If you go back to the ’20s, Louis Armstrong did really well while he was here, and of course that continued on up until the ’60s and ’70s. And I would say that over the last decade or so, there’s been a lot of younger people moving here to play, and there are places always opening up. The scene is always moving.

How much, if at all, does the band’s approach change if you’re in the studio or playing live?
I try to use the studio as much as possible as a way to document what the band does. I think the studio is kind of an artificial environment, at least for this kind of stuff. You’re not usually playing just for yourself, you usually have an audience, so I think it psychologically alters things. So usually I try to record after a group has done a tour or been performing a lot so going into a new room doesn’t seem unusual and we’re really familiar with material. We’re not worried about arrangements, we’re not worried about executing the compositions and playing them correctly—we can just concentrate, listen and play. I don’t use the studio as an opportunity, with all the technology that exists now, to cut and paste, piece together. I really believe there are certain characteristics to improvised music that should be left alone even if they are rough around the edges, even if they are what some people might consider to be mistakes, to keep them alive. The more things get perfected with the ability to do certain kinds of things [with sound editing], the more you iron out details that make the thing feel alive.

So as a listener, then, would you turn away from something extensively edited like In A Silent Way or Mingus, when he got heavily into editing?
That’s a really good question. There are different ways to use the studio. One is using it as a tool. Miles Davis and Teo Macero, they clearly wanted to use the studio that way and made amazing music with it. I’m not arguing against that!

Almost as an instrument, rather than a correctional device.
It was a way to make music happen. And their ideas were really revolutionary. And I think in the case of Mingus, it was kind of a similar thing to Glenn Gould, where the attempts to get an idealized version of his music meant that he had to cut pieces together because he probably couldn’t afford the time he needed to rehearse groups in the studio to get the takes he wanted.

With Gould, you can still hear him humming over the music.
And with Mingus, in some cases, the studio might have been a tool for him, instead of using it as another instrument. I think he was trying to get the music the way it should be, as opposed to discovering something new with it. And again, I’m not going to argue with the results of what they did, but I do find that with myself, if I’m playing a solo after a stretch of music where someone else had been playing, there are a lot of things that could have happened in that previous section that affect the decisions I make musically, even if they’re subconscious. There are so many cases now in rock music where they’re working with not even click tracks, but just disassembling the piece and cleaning up the rhythms in a computer. And if you compare the way that those grooves feel with the MC5 or the Stooges felt ... I mean, the music grooves so much harder without a click track, and without fixing all those mistakes.

How has rock music figured in your various groups? You frequently seem to incorporate rock elements in your music, without ever really moving toward fusion. But what is it about rock that’s allowed it to factor into your work? Jazz musicians often seem to shy away from rock, as though it’s beneath them.
I think every kind of music has its own requirements in order to be successful. There are a lot of people who talk about the Stooges—they’re one of my favorite bands—and I think when a lot of [jazz musicians] hear an album like Fun House, they hear the way the beats are played and they say that anyone can do that. But you can’t listen to the Stooges expecting to hear Charlie Parker, or you’re going to be disappointed. The same thing is true listening to Charlie Parker and wanting to hear the Stooges. When I listen to music like that and am able to get rid of what my expectations are based on the wrong set of requirements, then it frees me up to hear the music for what it’s meant to be. And when you do that, you discover that there are a lot of different kinds of music that could potentially inform the music that I work with, improvised music, coming out of the jazz tradition. That doesn’t lead to places like fusion. To me, fusion is like the virtuoso technique of jazz married with the worst aspects of prog-rock. It’s just the worst part of those two musics put together, taking the soul out of the stuff.

The difference between Miles Davis’ electric stuff and the kind of music that happened with, let’s say, Chick Corea’s electric stuff, are so far apart. The only relationship is maybe certain kinds of beats, certain kinds of electronic instruments, but aesthetically, it might as well be from another planet. So the interest in rock music—or punk or reggae—is the curiosity of, “What are the things about the rhythms of the Stooges that I like?” That’s been really useful to try to find new things to do. And right now, there’s so much music out there, there’s so much history from so many genres of music, that trying to pretend that there’s this direct line from the early years of jazz to where we are now is kind of naive. And to not use the resources that we have available now is also, I think, sort of ignorant. You know, John Coltrane was really interested in Eastern music. I can’t imagine that if John Coltrane was around now, he wouldn’t be the kind of person that would be listening to all the kinds of music that we have.

Let alone that he was studying 19th-century Parisian composers along with the Eastern scales.
Right. That’s the thing that interests me most about the history of the music. The most interesting people were really searching. To do that now, in today’s environment, means you’re going to be searching through different sets of material than you would’ve 30 years ago. And if we’re not doing that, I think we’re failing to do the job of what it means to be a musician.

In regards to emotional resonance, Charlie Parker is not really that dissimilar to the MC5 at the Grande Ballroom, in terms of a manic kind of intensity, even if we’re talking completely different musical structures, time signatures, keys.
That’s a really good way to say what I’m trying to say. I get excited about that emotional response, whether it’s Bartok, Charlie Parker or the MC5, that kind of visceral feeling of “I want to play that music” or “I want to hear that music” at any cost. That’s what I’m looking for and that’s what I want to be playing myself. To eliminate that experience by only listening to one kind of music, to only work with one set of material, seems like a very ignorant thing to do.

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